John Parker, after a career of teaching mathematics, retired to Cornwall and returned to his first love, the Latin language. He set about compiling this book, an extensive list of Latin words and phrases used by English writers, and indeed by English speakers, in the recent past and in the present. In the book he not only translates the Latin but also includes passages showing just how authors have embraced Latin and tucked it into their English... “Even before puberty Martin had known that deep within him were the makings of a great lover.… Samantha’s initial response to his tentative but markedly amorous advances seemed to hold out hope of his proceeding shortly a posse ad esse.” (P. J. Dorricot)... “I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico’ you know, and my poor reputation… will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid.” (Arthur Conan Doyle)... “Mrs. Knox was told that I had taken Mrs. McRory for a run in the car at one o’clock in the morning, and on hearing it said, ‘De gustibus non est disputandum’.” (E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross)... “Whether I owe my recovery to the Carp, to the Return of Spring, or to the Vis medicatrix Naturae, I am not yet able to determine.” (Aldous Huxley). The book also notes how music groups have adopted Latin titles for themselves and for their compositions: as well as “Status Quo” we have “Carpe Diem”, “De Profundis”, and “Veni Vidi Vici”. Many institutions have Latin mottoes: Moorfields Eye Hospital has “Fiat Lux̦, the Black Watch have “Nemo me Impune Lacessit”, the Feltmakers’ Company have “Decus et Tutamen in Armis”, and HMS Dauntless has “Nil Desperandum”, not to mention the “Citius, Altius, Fortius” of the Olympic Games. And this is just a sample. There’s plenty more inside.

Because there are no native speakers of Cornish, there is always the danger that revivalist will shape the revived language according to certain preconceptions. This was certainly true of Jenner and Nance. Revivalists should always be careful to study thoroughly the remains of the traditional language, and thus to base their speech on what is found in the texts rather than on either of the other Brythonic languages or on their own preferences. This is as true for matters of orthography and phonology as it is for the lexicon. In this book certain aspects of the Cornish consonantal system are examined, using as evidence only what is found in the surviving texts. Some at least of the discussion will not have appeared in print before. Thereafter some emendations to the Standard Written Form are suggested by which it might be rendered less inauthentic.

L’ancien français, qui se parla et s’écrivit, grossièrement, du milieu du 9e siècle au milieu du 14e siècle, connut de multiples variations selon temps et lieux, et nous en conservons des textes innombrables. — Old French was spoken and/or written in many parts of what is now France, very roughly north of the Loire, and in parts of Belgium ; it was also used in numerous circles in England, notably after the Norman conquest. It extended roughly from the middle of the ninth century to some time in the fourteenth century. It never stopped evolving, and there was much regional variation. Innumerable texts are written in that language, which gave birth to many literary genres. Aalis is written in a western variation of French, composed ca 1250 in the form of a chanson de geste which is versified in stanzas of assonanced decasyllables.

Sir Gerard Clauson’s "Skeleton Tangut (Hsi Hsia) Dictionary" survives as an unpublished manuscript because the author felt that he could not complete it without additional Tangut material. He began compiling the dictionary around 1938 but had to abandon the idea when it became clear that no more Tangut texts held in the USSR would be accessible in the foreseeable future. In the 1950s he deposited the manuscript and his other notes on Tangut studies in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with the aim of making them available to anyone engaged in the study of Tangut. He believed that the dictionary represented a solid structure which could be enriched with more lexical data once more Tangut texts were published. This facsimile edition makes his work accessible to a wider audience, in order to stimulate further research on the Tangut language. "Corpus Textorum Tangutorum" is a series presenting a variety of resources relevant to the study of Tangut, also known as Xixia, the north­eastern Tibeto-Burman language of the Western Xia empire, attested from 1036–1502.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a summer tale published by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) for the first time in July 1865. Many of the characters and adventures in that book have to with a pack of cards. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There is a winter tale, which Carroll first published in December 1871. In this second tale, the characters and adventures are based on the game of chess. This book contains the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, which first appeared in the original English edition. The Deseret alphabet was developed in the mid-19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret (later the University of Utah) under the direction of Brigham Young, second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was intended to help make learning to write English easier. This wasn't very successful, though the alphabet does have interesting phonemic features, as well as being a fascinating part of Mormon history. This edition of Through the Looking-Glass is written entirely in that same alphabet, with fonts specially designed by John H. Jenkins and Michael Everson.

The fonts used in this edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderlandhave been designed with the intention of making reading easier for people with dyslexia. OpenDyslexic3 (used for the body text) and Open­Dyslexic (used for its italics) were designed by Abelardo Gonzalez and Lexia Readable (used for the chapter titles drop-caps, and headers) was designed by Keith Bates. Research suggests that dyslexic-friendly fonts are not always effective for all readers; it hoped nevertheless that this edition may help at least some readers to enjoy Alice's adventures.

Gothic (Gutiska razda or Gutrazda) was a continental Germanic language spoken by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths in many areas (most notably Spain and Italy) throughout antiquity and the early Middle Ages; while Gothic appears to have become functionally extinct sometime in the eighth century, some form of the language may have continued to be spoken in the Crimea until the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Gothic Bible, translated from a lost Greek exemplar sometime ca. 360 CE by the Gothic bishop Wulfila, represents the earliest substantive text in any Germanic language. Gothic itself remains the only significant representation of the East Germanic branch of languages, which have since died off completely. Other extant works in Gothic include an exegesis of the Gospel of John known as Skeireins, a partial calendar, and some minor fragments. Unfortunately, all extant texts are incomplete, so it remains unknown to what extent the extant fragments are written in idiomatic Gothic, as well as exactly what dialect of Gothic they might represent.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized represen­tation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. This edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is written entirely in that same alphabet, with fonts specially designed by Michael Everson.

Francis K. Johnson devised Ñspel (pronounced "Ingspell") as a compre­hensive and radical reform of English spelling, because he believes that, in the case of such a magnificently complex and subtle language as English, piecemeal and conservative proposals cause more problems than they solve. Ñspel is largely phonemic, but also has a remarkable conciseness, owing much to the earlier traditions of shorthands. This edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is aimed at highlighting the question of spelling reform and to add an extra charm to the reader's journey, alongside Alice, to Wonderland.

This book brings together in one convenient volume eight articles by Professor Nicholas Williams on Traditional Cornish. They include “I-affection in Breton and Cornish” (2007), “The Cornish englyn” (2007), “The preterite in Cornish” (2010), “Some Cornish plurals” (2011), “Adjectival and adverbial prefixes in Cornish” (2013), “‘If’ in Cornish” (2014), “Reflexive verbs in Cornish” (2014), and “Auxiliary verbs in Cornish” (2016). These are presented in eight chapters; seven deal with various aspects of the historical phonology, morphology and syntax of traditional Cornish. One article examines the Cornish form of the englyn, a three-lined stanza common to both Cornish and Welsh. The first five of the chapters originally appeared as articles in Cornish Studies. Two further chapters were first given as short papers at the Skians conferences of 2014 and 2015 respectively. The last chapter of the book discusses the auxiliary verbs of traditional Cornish and has not been published hitherto. Because the sections below were written at different times and for varying purposes, there is a certain degree of overlap in their subject-matter.

Middle English is the name commonly given to the forms of English current from about 1100 to roughly 1500, between pre-Conquest Old English, which is hardly intelligible today without special study, and the early modern English of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Of course it changed considerably during that period, and different dialects existed in various geographical areas. The form of Middle English used in this translation is for the most part the East Midland and London dialect of writers like Chaucer in the fourteenth century, which is the direct ancestor of our modern standard form of English. It is not hard to read with a little practice, but an extensive glossary has been provided to assist the reader where necessary. Imagining what Londoners of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries might have made of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" provides a historical perspective not only on Chaucer's fourteenth century and Carroll's nineteenth, but on our own time as well.

Esperanto, the most widely-spoken constructed international auxiliary language, was the creation of Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, who first published it in 1887. Today Esperanto is estimated to have between 100,000 and 2,000,000 speakers worldwide. The most complete Esperanto dictionary is the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro, which is available both online and in printed format; but since the PIV is entirely in Esperanto, the need for a modern Esperanto-to-English dictionary remains keen for many Esperantists. Paul Denisowski’s Esperanto-English Dictionary can help fill a part of that need, on the basis of its sheer size alone, with more than 52,000 headwords. This extensive dictionary was compiled both from existing glossaries and from glossaries prepared by Denisowski himself, and it contains many words not usually found in smaller dictionaries, including an abundance of scientific terms, especially from the fields of medicine and mathe­matics. It is hoped that the publication of this diction­ary will assist a new generation of Esperanto learners in their enjoyment of this unique language.

Desky Kernowek, a complete guide to Cornish, is aimed at both beginners and the more advanced student. The book uses Standard Cornish, an orthography that is at once authentic and wholly phonetic. The whole grammar of Cornish is discussed in Desky Kernowek and both Middle and Late Cornish variants are accommodated. All points of grammar and vocabulary are exemplified by instances from the traditional texts in the original spelling. A key to the exercises is given at the end of the book for those learning Cornish by themselves. Desky Kernowek contains a comprehensive phrase-book taken exclusively from traditional Cornish. It also contains a detailed discussion of initial mutation, and a section on verbal usage. The book contains both Cornish-English and English-Cornish glossaries and a full index of subjects. The section on pronunciation and spelling was written by Michael Everson, a leading expert on writing systems. Professor Nicholas Williams, the author of Desky Kernowek, has been described by Philip Payton, Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies of the University of Exeter, as "the foremost scholar of the Cornish language".

Volapük is a constructed language, devised in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest who was inspired in a dream to create an international language. Schleyer adapted the vocabulary of Volapük mostly from English, supplemented by German, French. and Latin. The grammar of Volapük is regular and relatively simple-surprisingly easier, in fact, than it looks at first. Volapük was the first proposed International Auxiliary Language to enjoy widespread popularity: it is estimated that in 1889, there were some 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages, and that some­where between two hundred thousand and a million people had taken up study of the language. Esperanto, being similar to many European Romance languages, first appeared in 1887, and ultimately proved more popular. Today, the number of people studying Volapük is much lower than once it was, though Internet contacts have enabled Volapük enthusiasts to connect and communicate, and that new community has inspired the re-publication of this book. This Volapük grammar was written entirely in Volapük and was produced after the language reform which took place between 1921 and 1931. It has been out of print for many years, and it is hoped that its re-publication will assist a new generation of Volapük learners in their enjoyment of this unique language.

Arie de Jong’s magnificent German-Volapük Volapük-German dictionary has been out of print for decades. It is of course well known that the popularity of the Volapük language today is nothing like what it was in 1889, but the flame of interest in Volapük has never yet been extinguished. Unfortunately, the lack of availability of a comprehensive dictionary has made it extremely difficult for people interested in Volapük to make progress learning the language; most dictionaries available as reprints, for instance, are in Johann Martin Schleyer’s Volapük Rigik (‘Original Volapük’). But modern learners need a diction­ary which reflects the reforms made in Arie de Jong’s Volapük Nulik (‘New Volapük’, a term which I prefer to Volapük Perevidöl ‘Revised Volapük’ or Volapük Pevotastidöl ‘Reformed Volapük’). The re-publication of Wörterbuch der Weltsprache: Vödabuk Vola­püka is a mile­stone in the history of constructed languages, and will, perhaps, help to keep interest in Volapük alive well into the 21st century. Volapük is a rich and flexible language, endowed with an extensive vocabu­lary. It may have no future as an International Auxiliary Lan­guage, but it nevertheless has both intellectual and aesthetic value, whether for the Esperantist interested in the history of the IAL movement, or simply for the enthusiast who comes to enjoy Volapük for its own sake.

The first English-language edition of this Breton Grammar was published in 1995. The book is for the most part a straight forward translation of the ninth edition of Roparz Hemon’s Grammaire bretonne. In preparing the translation, a number of sections in the grammar were changed for the benefit of the English-speaking reader. Many, but not all, of these additions may be found in the notes to the various sections.

Much of the section on the pronunciation of Breton, especially the phonology, has been revised in response to the needs of the English-speaking reader. In restructuring the detailed analysis of Breton phonology, particularly that of the vowel system, synthesis has been made of the best of Jackson (1967), Kervella (1976) Trépos (1980), Favereau (1992); Lagadeg and Menard (1995) has been indispensible. For the difficult question of the consonants, see the Note to §219. The International Phonetic Alphabet is used quite strictly throughout this book. As this is a teaching as well as a reference grammar, the spirit of Hemon’s remarks in §§206–09 has been followed in standardizing the description and transcriptions. It is hoped that the reader first learning Breton will be served by such standardization in preparation for encountering real Breton dialects.

Although in the age of the Internet we have access to the magnificent Middle English Compendium hosted by the University of Michigan, few students of Middle English would question the usefulness of a desktop copy for day-to-day reference. There has been no handy, reliable edition of such a dictionary for many years. The 1888 edition of Mayhew and Skeat’s Concise Dictionary of Middle English can sometimes be found in antiquarian bookshops, but it is scarce, and available copies vary in both condition and cost. This new edition of Mayhew and Skeat has been revised and completely reset for the modern reader. It offers in a concise form more than 11,000 headwords with source references, cross references, and etymologies. Free online digital editions of the dictionary are now available at two major archives, and these too are useful for online searching. Some of these have been edited into legible formats; some are more or less raw ascii texts. A few “publishers” have released printed versions which are little more than dumps of those plain-text files—and I use the scare quotes advisedly here, feeling sorry for those students who have bought those editions thinking that they were, in fact, buying proper dictionaries. This edition has been set in Baskerville, a clear and accessible font, which it is hoped, will increase the legibility of the book. Further choices made in typesetting have led to additional changes in format, both for aesthetic reasons and to modernize the text in line with the contemporary reader’s expectations.

Mrs J. C. Gorham, alas, is known to us only by her married name—and this means, by the usual practice of the time, that her husband was named J. C. Nevertheless, Mrs Gorham is notable for having written three books in “Burt’s Series of One Syllable Books”, Gulliver’s Travels (1896) and Black Beauty (1905) being her other two, with some eleven other books in this “series of Classics, selected specially for young people’s reading, and told in simple language for youngest readers.

Retelling in words of one syllable is indeed a “clever game” and I dare say it isn’t easy to do—not convincingly, anyway. Mrs Gorham achieved it: her retelling in simple language for younger and early readers is still worth reading today.

Skeul an Tavas is a coursebook by Ray Chubb designed to meet the needs of those learning under the structure of the Languages Ladder programme of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families. Unlike some other coursebooks, this book teaches Cornish in a “can-do” way, and does not expect students to know the finer points of Cornish grammar from the beginning. The course starts with the basics—all presented in a friendly and accessible way.

This book is aimed at the Breakthrough level of the Languages Ladder. This consists of three stages and Skeul an Tavas is divided into three parts, each corresponding to one of those stages. The book is intended for internal teacher assessment in the stages leading to Breakthrough, but the whole syllabus required by a student to take the external assessment at Breakthrough level is covered in this book.

This new edition of Jenner’s classic Handbook of the Cornish Language appears more than a century after the book’s first publication. Now that the Cornish Revival has weathered many storms, it is well worth making Jenner’s ground-breaking work available again, copies of the 1904 edition having become rare and expensive.

This re-edition is not a mere facsimile. I have added phonetic transcriptions in the IPA, to assist the modern reader in under­standing exactly which sounds Jenner was recommending. (Two characters used here, [ᵻ] and [ᵿ], are not used in the IPA proper; the Oxford English Dictionary uses them for reduced [ɪ] (schwi) and reduced [ʊ] (schwu). See Note 31 on page 52.) Jenner’s Cornish spellings have been kept as he wrote them, except where a typographical error or omission had rendered his intention obscure. Breton spellings, however, have been updated to modern orthography.

This primer, first published in 1910, is intended for early readers, and for those who teach them. It has a relatively small vocabulary of just over 200 words, and presents nine classic stories: The Little Red Hen, The Ginger bread Boy, The Old Woman and the Pig, The Boy and the Goat, The Pancake, Chicken Little, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Little Tuppens, and Little Spider’s First Web.

The key to understanding the meaning of Cornish place-names is language. Most derive from the Cornish language primarily, but many of them have their roots in Old English, Middle English, French, and other languages which have left their mark on Cornwall. Through the tireless and exacting work of place-name specialists, the secrets of Cornish place-names are being unlocked for everyone. This dictionary offers in a concise format more than 3,300 place-names. The recommendations in this dictionary preserve the authentic and attested linguistic forms while at the same time honouring the traditional orthographic forms which have been visible on the Cornish landscape for at least four centuries.

The Samaritans share an origin with Jews, but the two peoples diverged thousands of years ago, already in Biblical times. The main schism between the cultures is the location of the Holy Temple, the “place the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name.” To the Jews, this meant Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. The Samaritans looked to God’s designation as a place of holiness and sacrifice in the book of Deuteronomy (11:29), and understood the designated site to be Mount Gerizim in Samaria, near the city of Shechem. There they continue to worship, and there even to this day they sacrifice the Passover offering every year.

The Samaritans consider only the Pentateuch to be a holy book; the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures are no more a part of the Samaritan Bible than the Christian New Testament is a part of the Jewish Bible. The Samaritan version of the Torah differs in several ways from the Jewish Masoretic version, and those differences are the purpose of this book. Both texts are given, in modern Square Hebrew script, on facing pages. Minor variations are printed in boldface type slightly larger than the ordinary text. Major variations are also printed in boldface type but even larger still than the minor variations.

The first English-language edition of this Breton Grammar was published in 1995. The book is for the most part a straight forward translation of the ninth edition of Roparz Hemon’s Grammaire bretonne. In preparing the translation, a number of sections in the grammar were changed for the benefit of the English-speaking reader. Many, but not all, of these additions may be found in the notes to the various sections.

Kernowek Kemyn, a form of spelling currently promoted by the Cornish Language Board, has been subject to sustained criticism for nearly two decades since its inception. The form and content of the Cornish Language Board’s publications continue to invite criticism and have inspired this volume. The essays begin with Michael Everson’s review of recent Cornish Language Board typography, including the second edition of Ken George’s Gerlyver Kres, the New Testament in Kernowek Kemyn, George’s Gerlyvrik, and the recent and controversial “preliminary edition” of Bywnans Ke. This is followed by a reprint of Everson’s review of the first edition of George’s Gerlyver Kres, since reference is made to it in the first article. Craig Weatherhill, Cornwall’s foremost expert on place-names, provides the next two articles, both reviews of Cornish Language Board publications, Place-Names in Cornwall and The Formation of Cornish Place-Names. Ray Chubb and Craig Weatherhill collaborated on a short paper in which they provide an analysis of the similarity of Revived Cornish orthographic forms to traditional spellings of Cornish place-names. Bernard Deacon provides two insightful articles, the first on the values expressed in Kernowek Kemyn rhetoric, and the second on the aims and methods of the Cornish Language Board. Finally, Nicholas Williams reviews An Testament Nowydh edited by Keith Syed and published by the Cornish Language Board.

Towards Authentic Cornish is in the first place a rebuttal of the defence of Kernowek Kemyn attempted by Paul Dunbar and Ken George in Kernewek Kemmyn: Cornish for the Twenty-First Century. In the present work, Professor Williams demonstrates with examples from the Cornish texts just how unconvincing is George’s defence of Kernowek Kemyn. The latter portions of the book offer a detailed critique of George’s Gerlyver Kernewek Kemmyn and of Wella Brown’s Grammar of Modern Cornish.

This book brings together in one convenient volume eight articles by Professor Nicholas Williams on the Cornish Revival. They range from his “A Problem in Cornish Phonology” (1990) in which he shows that the “phonemes” /dj/ and /tj/ of Kernowek Kemyn were unwarranted, to his review “‘A Modern and Scholarly Cornish-English Dictionary’: a Review of Ken George’s Gerlyver Kernewek Kemmyn” of 2001 in which he demonstrates how at least 370 entries in George’s dictionary are mistaken. Writings on Revived Cornish concludes with a short note on George’s inconsistent lexicographical practice with respect to geographical names, a discussion of the implications for the revived language of the recently-discovered play Bewnans Ke and the text of a lecture on Unified Cornish Revised given by Professor Williams in September 2006.

The publication of Cornish Today by Kernewek dre Lyther in 1995 was a landmark event in the Cornish Revival. In that book, Professor Williams offered the first professional analysis of the various systems of Cornish in use, and also outlined his suggested emendations for Unified Cornish. The present revised edition makes this most important work available to those who may have missed the earlier editions.

The author is a Bard of the Gorsedd of Cornwall, and lecturer in the Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College, Dublin. This 544-page dictionary is the most comprehensive English-Cornish dictionary ever published, containing over 25,000 headwords, many with extensive examples of words in context. The dictionary is 72% larger than Nance’s 1938 dictionary, and utilizes Unified Cornish Revised orthography. This second edition contains new vocabulary from the recently-discovered play Bewnans Ke. The section on Cornish place-names has also been expanded and revised.